No problem. Enjoyed it. I had
"Frozenwastes" as location on my profile, and someone
here suggested "Frozenwastesistan" which I had there
until the snow melted - yesterday, it seems. Temps
in the 40's all week, don't know if winter will ever go.

saparris wrote:I'm familiar with the Gullah dialect but didn't bring it up here, since it's confined to a population. It's also called Geechee. There is a very good novel called I've Been in Sorrow's Kitchen and Licked Out All the Pots, by Susan Straight, that deals with the Gullah-speaking people.

There's also a pretty good movie, whose Gullah dialogue can also be hard to follow, called Daughters of the Dust. The movie was set and filmed in St. Helena Island, South Carolina, and details the early life of director Julie Dash's great-grandmother. My father is from SC but he insisted the movie was set and filmed in Jamaica until I showed him the thanks to SC state agencies in the credits. (He's from Horry County, in the northeast corner of the state.)

My grandfather's from the southeast corner, southwest of where the movie took place, and I thought he had what was to me an odd way of saying certain words, that sounded more West Indian to me than US southern...

My grandfather's from the southeast corner, southwest of where the movie took place, and I thought he had what was to me an odd way of saying certain words, that sounded more West Indian to me than US southern...

The accents in SC don't exactly follow state lines. Broadly speaking, the Appalachian accent follows the mountain range for which it is named. Then comes the Piedmont-to-Midlands accent, and finally, the low-country, or coastal, accent. Appalachians and Piedmont residents are more nasal and pronounce there r's (even some that aren't there (tomater, etc.). Low-county people drop the r's in dinner, supper, river, etc., producing dinnuh, suppuh, and rivuh.

It would be harder to differentiate North Georgians from some Kentucky natives than it would up-county South Carolinians from low-county ones.

There are also "degrees" of all these accents, much of which can be attributed to age and education, as well as the whether the speaker is talking to friends and family or business associates.

In my grandfather's case the issue was an occasional tel-e-VI-sion rather than the way US speakers (and he himself) would usually stress it, TEL-e-vi-sion -- the first example that comes to mind, though there were plenty of others.

And the dialogue in the movie reflect speech patterns of the central part of coastal South Carolina from the turn of the 20th century -- the group of Julie Dash's relatives who sailed to Nova Scotia at the end of the movie left in 1902. Similarly my grandfather was born in SC in 1919 and left with his family for New York in 1931.

There is an area in SC between Columbia and Charleston (roughly from Orangeburg and Santee southward toward the coast) where I have heard elevator pronounced eda-VAE-duh. These folks tend to replace l's with d's, so Harleyville becomes Hoddyville,, biology becomes biodogy, and Satan is Sae-dun. They also drop most final r's, so if you have a plumbing problem, you call Roduh Rooduh instead of Roto Rootor.

Another oddity of their dialect is that the elongate syllalbes in an odd sort of way. Green beans are gree-un bee-uns, and Jason becomes Jay-uh-son.

We have a town called St. Libory. No one knows how
to pronounce it, and hears LiBORy and LIBory or
LiborY. Weird.

Across the river in Iowastan there is a town called
Limoni, pronouced Li mon I, accent on last I.
Weather people when giving the temp etc, will
say Lemoni, and every other word. Sure can tell
when the station brings in an import to their staff.